Cory Booker Deserves a Hearing

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/opinion/cory-booker-2020.html

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Cory Booker can sound like he’s giving a political speech even when he’s talking to only one person. He will quote historical figures or tell well-crafted anecdotes with a moral. He will repeat little sayings like, “Get folk woke.”

I interviewed Booker — the Democratic presidential candidate, New Jersey senator and former Newark mayor — for this week’s episode of “The Argument” podcast, and my No. 1 goal was to keep him from lapsing into these mini-speeches.

In my preparation for the interview, I read up on Booker’s policy agenda, and I found it to be extremely thoughtful. I don’t agree with every part of it, as you will hear if you listen to the podcast. On balance, though, his ideas would make America a better, fairer place to live. And his proposals have a level of detail that those of many other candidates still lack. But much of the public conversation about Booker’s 2020 candidacy hasn’t been about his agenda. It’s instead been about his style, like his overarching message of “radical love,” or his early poll numbers.

After immersing myself in Booker’s platform, I came away thinking that he deserves a hearing as a top-tier candidate.

He has both executive experience, as a mayor, and national experience, as a senator. He has some clear accomplishments, including his role in passing the recent bipartisan bill on criminal justice reform. And his policy proposals — organized around the theme of justice — span inequality, housing, gun safety, mass incarceration and more. In the interview, he and I debate several of those proposals.

I won’t claim that the interview avoided all of his mini-speeches. But I can tell you that I learned a lot from the conversation.

Related: Booker will be one of the 10 Democrats participating in the first debate of the campaign tonight. Ten others take the stage tomorrow night. “Few other contenders are under as much pressure to distinguish themselves at this debate, and the one next month, as [Booker] is,” Jonathan Martin and Nick Corasaniti of The Times write.

For more on Booker’s agenda …

Baby bond programs like the one Booker proposes “have been rigorously studied since the 1990s and have been remarkably successful at helping people gain financial success,” my colleague Nick Kristof has explained.

On guns, Booker would create a national licensing program and strengthen background checks. “Booker’s plan would protect gun rights while making it harder for violent people to get firearms — the simple goal that all reform proposals should be measured against,” Bloomberg Opinion’s editorial board wrote.

“Booker is often far ahead of other politicians, including those in his party, when it comes to criminal justice reform. In the 2020 Democratic primary, it’s one issue that could make him stand out,” Vox’s German Lopez writes.

Booker’s voting rights proposal — which would make Election Day a national holiday and expand voting by mail, among other things — “is a glimpse at the activist spirit of his candidacy,” Darren Sands of BuzzFeed News writes.

In The Atlantic last year, Annie Lowrey explained the theory behind a universal federal jobs guarantee; Booker supports a pilot program to explore one. New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait has argued (and I agree) that such a program would be difficult to carry out.

Booker’s overhaul of Newark’s schools is a frequent source of criticism from the left. But as Vox’s Dylan Scott has explained, student performance on English and math tests, as well as graduation rates, rose after the overhaul. Experts “can’t say how much of that improvement is directly attributable to the Newark reforms,” Scott writes, “but nevertheless, there are strong data points in favor of the Booker program.”

Booker’s affordable housing plan would subsidize rent and expand affordable housing. “Perhaps the most far-reaching idea in Booker’s platform is a proposal to steer federal funds toward local efforts to ease restrictive zoning, a factor exacerbating the affordability crisis,” CityLab’s Kritson Capps writes. Conservatives have criticized the rent subsidies, saying they would lead landlords to raise rents. “Gee, I wonder if eliminating these renters’ price sensitivity might have some unintended consequences,” National Review’s Robert Verbruggen has written.

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